As we dragged ourselves to our living room on the 41st floor near York Avenue at dawn last month, roses and metallic blues were competing with each other over the ice, accentuated by towers of frozen smoke.
I had seen the movie “Mr. Turner,” about the British painter J. M. W. Turner, with its shipwrecked frozen barks and shocking skies, and here was a frozen ruined urban seascape laid out beneath our view.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited the National Gallery on Varnishing Day, and in the film depicting this scene she proclaims Mr. Turner’s work “a yellow mess.” But our sunrise also had messily impossible combinations, from the glacial-milk metallic blue of the ice floes to the desert-rose clouds. How to deal with it? Rejoice!
Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via email diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.